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After spending several years touring the country as a stand up comedian, Ed Brayton tired of explaining his jokes to small groups of dazed illiterates and turned to writing as the most common outlet for the voices in his head. He has appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show and the Thom Hartmann Show, and is almost certain that he is the only person ever to make fun of Chuck Norris on C-SPAN.

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Rick Joyner Disproves Evolution

Okay, all you biologists, geneticists, anthropologist and other scientists who do research in evolution, you can all stop now. World class dumbass Rick Joyner has proven that evolution is “not only ridiculous, it’s impossible.” And the evidence the dumbass cites is the jackass. Mules, apparently, disprove evolution.

If only we’d known this sooner, we could have saved 150 years of research confirming common descent. Damn it all.

Comments

If only we’d known this sooner, we could have saved 150 years of research confirming common descent.

Actually, that is part of the point.

(1) Scientists (in all fields, like climate research) are too lacking in common sense and largely ignorant of what is going outside of their particular ivory towers, so the common man (that is, conservative evangelical Protestants) can use their common sense to check the nonsense these clowns spout. Too much education is a bad thing.

(2) There is a conspiracy among Scientists, Government, and Gay-Feminist-Atheist-Muslims to destroy True Christianity and keep the common man (white evangelical Protestants down). One must always be on guard against the Liberal America-hating propaganda.

That common facts that disprove evolution/global warming/atheism can be ignored for 150 years isn’t surprising. It is an obvious result of the instutionalized ignorance of the hyper-specialized pointy-headed elties, and also a part of the conspiracy to ignore inconvenient facts.

Joyner – like most RWAs – is clearly unaware than his argument from ignorance proves only how ignorant he is.
I have wondered why so many people have chosen to be so willfully ignorant since I was about 11 years old – when a school chum replied to a question I asked him that it didn’t matter if something was true or not, if the teachers (in our case, nuns) required us to believe something, then he would believe it, and so should I!

Rick Joyner, Cindy Jacobs, and the rest of the New Apostles are some of more obvious scammers.

You get to be a New Apostle by saying you are a New Apostle. It is so easy, anyone on this thread could do it. It is sort of a minor title though. I’ve been Chief Subpope, a Prophet, and a Valkyrie before but they are no panacea. You still have to work the marks.

Animals can only reproduce according to their own kinds (as per Genesis). We see evidence of this because mules (the offspring of horses and donkeys) can’t themselves reproduce. Therefore it is impossible for species to change into other species, and the theory of evolution is obviously ridiculous.

Okay… So he knows about this specific sort of mule, but does he know (a) other types of mules (sterile species crosses), (b) the hinny (cross a horse and donkey the other way), or (c) the species crosses that *can* reproduce?

Apparently, Joyner has never hear of a cross between a lion and a tiger (liger if the lion is male, tigon if the tiger is male). Female liger/’tigons are fertile. It appears that male liger/tigons are generally sterile, although there is some evidence that they go through a brief period of fertility.

Animals can only reproduce according to their own kinds (as per Genesis). We see evidence of this because mules (the offspring of horses and donkeys) can’t themselves reproduce. Therefore it is impossible for species to change into other species, and the theory of evolution is obviously ridiculous.

It seems a fairly common argument against evolution. Unfortunately, responding requires a slightly longer explanation, covering speciation and the modern Biological Species Concept — and more difficultly, the BSC’s probabilistic edges.

markr1957“I have wondered why so many people have chosen to be so willfully ignorant since I was about 11 years old…”
Now you’re just being ridiculous. So many people were so willfully ignorant long before you were 11 years old.

whheydt“…the hinny (cross a horse and donkey the other way)”
You’re both wrong. Horse plus donkey equals honky. That’s just common sense.

colnago80“It appears that male liger/tigons are generally sterile, although there is some evidence that they go through a brief period of fertility.”
I went through a brief period of fertility once. I’d add more, but it gets pretty blue.

Guess the guy never heard of ring species.
Species A & B have fertile offspring.
Species B & C have fertile offspring.
Species C & D have fertile offspring.
Species D & E have fertile offspring.
Species E & A do not have fertile offspring or cannot reproduce at all.

Every high school biology student is taught about mules as an example of post-zygotic species barriers. You also learn that species aren’t always distinct, and that different species concepts can assign two populations to the same or different species. Which is exactly what you’d expect if species teased apart slowly from a common ancestor rather than being poofed into place as platonic kinds.

And here I’ve been looking at F3 Savannah cats. F1 is an African serval, very much not felis domesticus,
F2 is an F1 female and a male domestic cat. The offspring are F3 and quite fertile. Sometimes an F3 is bred back to a serval, and some of those male offspring are fertile.

Now tell me again, Rick, about horses and mules. Or were you thinking of the time a jackass (you) tried to mount a mare?

Spartina alternaflora crossbreeds with Spartina maritima and produces the sterile offspring Spartina X townsendii. So this disproves evoluti… what are you doing Spartina X townsendii oh right plants can reproduce through vegetative reproduction. That’s not Spartina X townsendii that’s the polyploid mutant Spartina Anglica which is a new species double the chromosome number and sexually fertile but can’t breed with it’s antecedents. My obsession with S. Anglica continues.

It seems to me Joyner disproved the Bible. “They will each multiply after their kind.” So how do we even get a mule? It would seem to me that two animals multiplied *not* after their kind to get the mule in the first place. That a mule cannot reproduce is irrelevant.

I assume he’s thinking that a donkey giving birth to a horse would have produced an offspring that would have noone to mate with. These folks don’t really get the idea of gradual adaptation by a population, do they? If they don’t think that individuals are “evolving”, they think that hopeful monsters are what biologists are describing.
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The correct answer is to ask them whom the first French speaker talked to? If they are smarter than the average fundie, you can explain that languages shift slowly, a little every generation. Everybody can talk to everybody else in their village, but eventually you have people who would not have been able to talk to their ancestors in the Roman Empire.
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In church I once heard the youth group leader say “Evolution can’t be true. If it were, we might have evolved on Mars, and then we’d all be dead.” What was truly horrifying was the smug look on his face, as though he had a gotcha which those smarty-pants scientists couldn’t respond to. I know that I couldn’t.